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As someone who does research for a living for big clients on big projects, I can appreciate how easy it would be to drop it from small projects, especially given everything else the team would have to do.

I think the easiest way to understand what you’re missing by not doing research is to realise how many assumptions you’re working on and the risk that these bring. In my experience, assumptions that are not validated in research are the cause of almost all bad design decisions.

Even if you can’t do any research with users, you should think about the big assumptions, the big questions: What is the role of this website? Who are its users? What are they trying to achieve? What’s important to them? Often these basic assumptions are not known and you should always seek to clarify them, either through research with users or the client.